Jaime de Angulo
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| Jaime de Angulo | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1887 Paris, France |
| Died | 1950 (aged 62–63) |
| Occupation | Linguist and Novelist |
| Nationality | Spanish |
| Subjects | Native Californian Tribes |
Jaime de Angulo (1887-1950) was a linguist, novelist, and ethnomusicologist in the western United States. He was born in Paris of Spanish parents. He came to America in 1905 to become a cowboy, and eventually arrived in San Francisco on the eve of the great 1906 earthquake. He lived a picaresque life including stints as a cowboy, medical doctor and psychologist. He survived a very dramatic suicide attempt after cutting his throat from ear to ear in Berkeley. Ultimately, he was a linguist who contributed to the knowledge of certain Northern Californian languages, as well as some in Mexico.
He began his career at the University of California, Berkeley in the early 1920s, shortly after his marriage to L. S. (“Nancy”) Freeland. During this period he and his wife lived among many native Californian tribes, often becoming fully integrated into their daily lives, in an attempt to study their culture, language and music. As a linguist he contributed to the knowledge of more than a dozen native Northern Californian and Mexican languages and music-systems. De Angulo was particularly interested in the semantics of grammatical systems of the tribes he studied, but he was also a skilled phonetician and a pioneer in the study of North American ethnomusicology, particularly in his recordings of native music. As an intellectual, de Angulo was cordial with Franz Boas, Alfred L. Kroeber, and Edward Sapir, and received considerable support for his fieldwork from Boas’s Committee on American Native Languages.
In the end, de Angulo’s Bohemian lifestyle kept him from pursuing a normal academic career, and his involvement in Native American research effectively came to an end following the accidental death of his son in 1933 and his retreat to an isolated hilltop ranch at Big Sur. At this point his writings took a wild turn into fiction and poetry. Much of his fictional work attempted to recognize and embrace the native “coyote tales”, or the trickster wisdom inherent in native storytelling. Ezra Pound called him "the American Ovid” and William Carlos Williams "one of the most outstanding writers I have ever encountered." de Angulo also went on to tutor numerous famous authors including Jack Spicer in linguistics, and Robert Duncan in North American shamanic sorcery; he appears as a character in Jack Kerouac's books.
Perceptions of de Angulo swing wildly; he is seen alternately as a gifted but irresponsible and failed amateur, to an ‘‘Old Coyote,’’ an anarchist hero and talented subversive[1]. However, it cannot be denied that de Angulo shaped and diversified the scholarly picture of the native Californian landscape. Bohemian to the core, he was friend and colleague to poets, composers, and scholars such as Harry Partch, Henry Miller, Robinson Jeffers, Henry Cowell, Carl Jung, D. H. Lawrence, and many others.
[edit] The works of Jaime de Angulo
- Coyote Man and Old Doctor Loon
- Coyote's Bones
- Indians in Overalls
- Indian Tales
- The Lariat
- Old Time Stories, Volume 1: Shabegok
- Old Time Stories, Volume 2: How The World Was Made
[edit] Further reading
- Jaime de Angulo Reader, A -- Edited by Bob Callahan
- Music of the California Indians, The -- Edited by Peter Garland
- Jaime in Taos: The Taos Papers of Jamie de Angulo- Gui de Angulo (daughter)
- The Old Coyote of Big Sur: The Life of Jaime de Angulo- Gui de Angulo
- For information regarding Jamie de Angulo’s native recordings: http://www.angelfire.com/sk/syukhtun/Jaime.html
